Le puits des morts is a split album featuring Sorcier des Glaces and French black metal band Ende. On the first side, Sorcier des Glaces present four all new songs in their distinctive style of epic black metal continuing from their last few albums (including North from earlier in 2016) after the band’s abandoning of keyboards.

Artistically bankrupt metal bands typically rerecord their early material after milking the revenue streams dry through reissues, remasters, anniversary tours, and boxed sets. While the original recordings typically aren’t pristine productions, all charm is lost in the sample-replaced, quantized, digitally-reamped, and phase-butchered retreads shat out by an obsessive tinkerer’s digital audio workstation. All enthusiasm in the performances is butchered by years of alcohol abuse and aging journeyman musicians collecting just another paycheck, e.g. Sodom’s The Final Sign of Evil, Manowar’s Battle Hymns MMXI, and Bolt Thrower’s “World Eater ‘94”. Snowland MMXII is one of the few exceptions to this rule of rehash.

Death Metal Underground staffer Corey M reached out to the prolific French-Canadian black metal band Sorcier des Glaces for a written interview about their career. Our staff compiled a list of questions which Sébastien from Sorcier des Glaces thankfully and thoroughly answered:

Sorcier Des Glaces & Ende “Le Puits des Morts” will be released in September via Obscure Abhorrence Productions! A “split” album filled with darkness, isolation and misanthropy… brand new songs from both bands, exclusive ones. There will be some guests on the title track, “Le Puits des Morts”, including Monarque, Nordet (Brume d’Automne), Blanc Feu (Chasse-Galerie, Cantique Lépreux) & I. Luciferia (Ende). A first song will be available by the end of April. Here’s the track-listing of this unholy alliance:

An astounding eighteen years after releasing their debut full-length, Sorcier des Glaces releases North, maintaining their streak of high-quality albums. The themes of their last album, Ritual of the End(one of 2014’s best releases), are still present here and revolve around the band’s signature lyrical and melodic concepts; descriptions of people and places undergoing freezing damnation, in their unique vision of death occurring over epic spans of time.

This music holds the rare power to instill visions and sensations of ice-covered ruins and crippling cold by its melodic prowess alone. However, the vocals and lyrics are praiseworthy as well as the delivery is unnervingly clear, poetically orating scenes of melancholic morbidity illustrated by the music. This is achieved by Sorcier des Glaces’ idiosyncratic approach to writing long riffs with slow and steady chord changes all augmented by faster-moving melodies that anticipate and resolve the myriad melodically unorthodox transitions. It’s so rare to hear this style of complex harmonic activity performed this adroitly that the only similar album I can think of that achieves this level of complexity tempered by an intuitive sense of coherency is Far Away from the Sun. That is a high compliment.

In terms of technical performance, the musicians’ set-up is very similar to what is heard on Ritual of the End. Driving drums impel the helical, tremolo-picked, complimentary melodies which the lone guitarist/bassist cleanly divides into trios. The main melodies are carried by the rhythm guitar’s very long chains of power chords and the bass guitar modifies the basic root notes of the rhythm guitar, adding much harmonic depth to the songs. Meanwhile, one or more guitars play high-register leading melodies that expertly illuminate the emotive potential of the progressions. Playing their instruments at such a wide range of timbre and speed creates a broad, orchestral sound. The band’s creative flexibility allows the orchestra to tower indomitably, or branch out and flow smoothly, winding naturally around musical obstacles, like the trickle of water over irregular, rocky terrain.

The musicians even get a little bit more boldly experimental on North, particularly during the title track “North”, utilizing some long sections of cleanly picked chords that mutate and creep toward obscure resolutions while the bass dances its own giddy cadenza beneath the reverberating guitars. Typically this sort of deviation would wreck the feel of a song in the hands of inadept musicians, but here it is a delight. “Dawn of the Apocalypse” features an epic lyrical narrative enhanced by some more extreme shifts in dynamic intensity of the music. None of the changes are jarring or illogical; rather, they occur organically.

Despite the long and winding song progressions, I would recommend this album even to uninitiated metal fans. The sweeping guitar orchestration will ensnare anyone with a keen sense of musical passion, allowing Sorcier des Glaces’ malevolent shroud to obscure their sense of righteousness as they succumb to the awesome power of ice and occultic magic. North is an excellent album that will provide many journeys into the frigid recesses of the unconscious, at once harrowing and wondrous.

We had a brief teaser for North almost a year ago. In the mean time, Sorcier des Glaces has released one of its upcoming tracks, as well as a longer trailer for the album, and they’ve also set a release date – February 29th. I’d take this release date with a grain of salt, since Sorcier des Glaces has been known to delay them a great deal for whatever reason. Case in point – this album’s predecessor (Ritual of the End) was originally planned for 2012 but didn’t release until 2014. Still, whether or not it gets released on time, it should be a worthy acquisition; the band’s style remains intact, and that means strength of melodic development and extended songwriting for everyone.

French Canadian black metal band Sorcies des Glaces announced that the band is heading into the studio this summer to finish the recording of North, its upcoming LP. The band also released the cover image above.

Known for its flowing black metal in the style of old Immortal and Graveland, but an idiosyncratic twist of its own, Sorcier des Glaces graced a number of the “best of 2014” lists floating around the internet including our own. Hopes are high for the new material.